Oxford English Dictionary Adds 400 New Words

Oxford English Dictionary, just like earlier this year, has added a whole new bunch of words into its arsenal including “retweet”, ‘woot”, “sexting”, “textspeak”, “cyberbullying”, “jeggings”, “mankini”, “domestic goddess”, “gastric band” etc.

A total of 400 new words have been added, which make the total number of words in the 12th edition of the concise dictionary sum up to 240,000.

“Sadly, the new edition has no room for tremendous words like brabble ‘paltry noisy quarrel’ and growlery ‘place to growl in, private room, den’ — what we might call a man cave these days, but the preoccupations of today’s Generation Y have opened the door to some equally colourful vocabulary — how about momo, noob, nurdle, and woot?”

It seems that the OED’s evolution would continue as the internet is continuously pumping out new words daily. We should expect next year’s edition to even contain words like “anon”, “brb” etc.